our
liberties (a queer palladium that needs to be guarded) against this
peril by using glass globes instead of the 'urns' employed in France,
which are in fact wooden boxes. The idea delighted him. He rubbed his
hands together with a chuckle, and said 'That would be capital! That
would bother them! But for that reason we shall not have your glass
urns!'

When the votes have all been emptied out of the urns and verified and
counted by the Mayor and the assessors, the Mayor distributes them among
the scrutineers. At each table a scrutineer takes the votes up one by
one, reads out in a clear voice the name of the candidate inscribed on
each vote, and passes it to another scrutineer, who sees it duly
registered, the Mayor and assessors the while supervising all the
proceeding. In communes containing less than 300 inhabitants the Mayor
and assessors themselves may scrutinise and declare the results.

As St.-Ouen-le-Pin falls just two short of this number, M. Conrad de
Witt not only lost his luncheon but his dinner. He never got back to the
chateau till ten o'clock at night.

The polling place in this commune was a small house opposite the village
church. I walked over to it after breakfast through the fields and by
lovely green lanes as deep as the lanes of Devonshire, with M. Pierre de
Witt and one of his kinsmen. The mass was going on in the village
church, and the singing of the choir seemed to me at least as fitting an
accompaniment to the expression by the sovereign people of their
sovereign will through bits of white paper--Mr. Whittier's 'noiseless
snowflakes'--as the braying of a brass band, or the hoarse shouts of a
more or less tipsy multitude.

In the Protestant corner of this Catholic churchyard, under some fine
trees, M. Guizot sleeps his last sleep in the simple tomb of his family.
Here, again, I thought, was a moral harmony better than any 'moral
unity'!

We had a merry and an animated dinner that night at Val Richer. Message
after message was brought in from the nearest communes, all of one
tenor. The Republican 'trick' had evidently exasperated the worthy
Norman voters, and brought them up to the polls most effectually! By ten
o'clock it was clear that M. Pierre de Witt was elected by a majority
too large to be 'whittled' away, and that the surreptitious appearance
of the Republicans in the field had served only to emphasize their
political weakness. In the canton, Cambremer itself, lying at a distance